WH40K: Not Left Behind!
by Sir Rawk
Summary: The sole survivor upon a world taken over by the forces of Chaos, a young woman must fight against all odds and hold onto her sanity in a world overrun by daemons and monsters, where everyone and everything she knows is long dead. And although she finds sanctity and peace in the fallen corpse of a mighty Space Marine, perhaps she is not alone after all. Perhaps there is still hope
1. Chapter 1

**This is the first WH40K story I've written in a long, long while. I'll try and keep to all the fluff where possible, I'm sure you guys'll let me know if I go off the rails too far. I used to write quite a lot at the Black Library under the pseudonym SGT RAWK before it closed down, but its good to see an avenue for these stories again. This is about a rim world fallen into the Eye of Terror, and about my SM Chapter the Silver Fists. That said all rights belong to Games Workshop. This story had its roots in an idea that occurred to me several years ago. I lost that story when my computer files got eaten up by a deadly virus. This is my first attempt to revise it from memory. Interestingly enough there is a fair amount of allegory between my gobbled up computer files and my protagonist's plight!  
**

* * *

**{ .. I .. }  
**

She was eighteen today. A legitimate adult!

Not that anyone would notice, or bestow her with birthday wishes, balloons, or surprise ambushes from behind doors or inside cupboards, cuddles and claps, or one of those embarrassing birthday songs! How did it go? 'Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday dear Katrys, Happy birthday to _yooooouuuu_..."

She blinked. Surprised at the hot salty moisture that swelled up like twinkling little diamond balloons that danced along the rim of her sight, causing the rubble strewn street and collapsed shopping district where she stood to swim and glisten like the passing of a Warp storm. Silly girl, she thought. You haven't cried in years! Big Silver would be ashamed of you!

Katrys swiped the tears from her cheeks with a grimy forearm and rolled her eyes toward the turquoise skies of her home, taking a big gulp of the bitter morning air.

It had been a long time since she had seen a blue sky like the one she remembered from her childhood. But then it had been a long time since her world had been swallowed up by the great Hellstrom, the Eye of Terror the Imperials called it, and everything she had ever known had ceased to exist. At least the alien firmament, however merciless it was, could still offer a close approximation of a blue sky once in a while. Once or twice a year it came out like this, when it wasn't burning with the colours of the Warp. Though there was still the tell-tale sickly yellow red haze on the horizon that revealed this was no ordinary sky, but an atmosphere slowly relinquishing its natural laws to the realm of Chaos.

Night time was the worst, however. When all the stars were out. The 'mad stars' they had called them back then, when there were still people around to name such things. She tried not to look at the stars any more: all those warped worlds sliding around befouled suns giving her a preview of where her own world Ophregus was headed.

Slowly or quickly, Katrys thought, all things inevitably died.

She had seen nothing but death since the night of her thirteenth birthday. And she had watched everything burn, twist, scream and be consumed every year since. Like this small shopping village where she stood, where her family had brought her on the weekends.

Sunkiss Fair.

The sign was still up, at the top of the building, the part which hadn't collapsed along with all the others in the street, high up where it could be seen from all three streets pushing up the hill toward it. Sunkiss Fair, where your family can be kissed by the sun whilst having a shopping day of fun. That's how the jingle went. Terribly corny, but it had such powerful sentiment to her past.

She missed jingles, along with vids and data plates, and pop songs. Kids vids she missed the most, because she had still loved them even at thirteen. Happy Hopper & The Angry Grox. The Wonderful Life of Mrs Catspaw. The Arms of Imperium. Hilton Higgets Does A Mess. But all of it was gone. Dead like all the rest. Her family, her friends, everyone at school, even all those people you never thought much about, but still made such a difference to your day just by being there.

But everything had died, been killed - or turned. Except herself. And she was not about to let that happen. Not while she still breathed. Not after the sworn promise she had made to Big Silver. Not while she could still fight!

She had grown up quick in five years. The perfect birthday present she could hope for was a day without the threat of imminent death, where she could just wander the desolated streets, rummaging for bits and pieces, maybe a new evening dress, or a new pair of boots. The thought amused her somewhat, and of course was sheer fantasy, but it brought a strange slow smile across her face that warmed her pretty grey eyes. If there were people to see her right now they would have thought her an attractive young woman, if not for the grime on her face and arms, and the mismatched clothing she had stolen off corpses or pilfered from shattered shops. She had a good figure, she thought. Everyone had been so obsessed with keeping fit in her culture before the Great Change, she wondered if they would have traded their simple routines at the gym back then for a single day of her life of survival now. She doubted it. Not in a million years! It was a pity there was no boy around to tell her how Stompin' she looked in her new jeans.

She wore tight dark denim, her long legs tucked into mud-caked calf-high fir trimmed boots. It could get cold at night, and it was early morning and the warped sun was late to warm, so she still wore her thick black hooded parka. It was great because it had all sorts of pockets in it. A pair of snow goggles hung around her long neck. Her long blonde hair - which she cut once every couple of months - was tied back into a long tail down her back. Her nose may have been a little hooked perhaps, but it leant her face a cheekiness and more matured beauty. Her lips were full, and were once quick to smile. She had big eyes still, with dark lashes to die for. Ordinarily, in another life in another world she might have been a pretty office clerk, or a lawyer, or the assistant manager of an upmarket restaurant. But now, all she had ever learnt and became good at was run, hide - and kill. She was strong too. But then she had to be to survive.

She always came to Sunkiss Fair. At least once a week, to pay her respects to Big Silver. This was where they had first met. This was where all her family had died right before her eyes, and Big Silver with them. This was where she had once been Katrys The Thirteen Year Old Little Girl, with pig-tails and big smiles and endless laughter. Especially at the expense of her two older brothers. But Willis and Tamlyn were gone now too. She guessed it might seem odd to others that she did not come to the fair to pay her respects to her family but rather to her saviour and hero. Of course, their bodies were long gone to dust. Big Silver's body, however, would never rot away. Not for a million years. But she came to see only him, because it was him and not her family that had saved her life. Her family had been screaming and running in terror like everybody else when the creatures erupted from the skies and clawed up out of the ground in all their hideous forms.

Events had settled down since then. Once the minions of Chaos had nothing left to murder and torture they tended to hybernate, or journey to other places that had not yet experienced their perverted forms of world order.

She hefted the las-rifle and rested it in the crook of her arm. It felt very natural to hold it this way. The las-rifle had become more of a companion to her in these dark times than any human she had ever known. She had taken it from a dead Guardsman, ripped in half by some monstrous leviathan. Luthox she had named the rifle. After the family dog. Because like Luthox the canine, Luthox the las-rifle was a girl's best friend. It kept her safe, and would do so until the day she made her first big mistake and ended up dead like all the rest. Which, from her experience, could be today or the day she turned thirty. But the thought of having a day off from all the terror amused her. And so she pondered it a little while longer, just as she might have pondered becoming the president of her country before the Eye of Terror swallowed it all to hell. She giggled.

That was her first mistake of the day. She guessed she deserved it too.

So much for Happy Birthday To You!

The Faceless emerged from the rubble behind her and pointed a tiny bony finger in her direction. Its jaw dropped open sickeningly low and an ear splitting shriek erupted from that wide maw as if all the thunder of an angry storm had been bunched up inside it waiting to erupt for this one moment.

They had been children once, the Faceless. Now, though it still held the form of an adolescent, its visage had been wiped blank by the deformities of the Warp, melting skin and muscle and bone until there was only one orifice at its centre - a great gaping black hole of a mouth. The Faceless used this hole to shriek out warnings to the main host. They acted as forward observers, alerting the main host to wherever the living might be found. And their scream was capable of rupturing a human's brain, making eyes bleed, and causing waves of nausea. They were one of the flimsiest proponents of the dark host of daemons, yet they were capable of sending entire companies of soldiers fleeing for their sanity.

Who knew how long this one had been sleeping there, under the rubble, waiting for this exact moment when something living, something pure, untouched, walked by and made the mistake of... giggling?

Did it have to be a mistake? Katrys remembered how freely she used to let her laughter ring out loud throughout the household; when Tamlyn had bumped his head on the edge of the laundry cupboard, or when Willis had opened up that great big bottle of gingerbrew, after she had given it one hell of a shake, and it had exploded all over the kitchen, all over him. She remembered laughter being so free and fresh. When you could laugh till you were giddy.

The Faceless howled at her. Yellow drool poured from the edges of its dislocated maw, and it stalked rapidly toward her. A child form, turned all into horror. Its supersonic cry sending blades of pain through her skull.

She pulled Luthox to her shoulder, took aim and fired in one clean motion.

The creatures head erupted into a great geyser of smoking meat and yellow pus. The body continued to stride forward, arms outstretched, it's little legs taking several more steps before realizing the head had been purified by Imperial fire. That's what the Commissars had said when the Imperial Guard were here trying to evacuate all the families before the attack. 'Purify them all', they had screamed, 'purify them with the Emperor's Light!'

Katrys looked down on the twitching corpse of the Faceless. It was too late already, she knew that, but at least it's reconnaissance days of sounding alarms were over. The horde would be on their way soon, or worse.

So she waited. And slowly breathed in, and slowly breathed out; using her ears to pick out every detail of sound around her. She would make Big Silver proud, just as she had promised, or die trying...


	2. Chapter 2

**{ .. II .. }**

There were two ways Katrys could do this. She could wait to see what the daemons had to throw at her and try her luck at killing it, or she could run and hide. The first option left a bad taste in her mouth. If there was one thing she had learned living amongst daemons, it was that if you managed to kill one, you could bet your life that something bigger and uglier would soon follow. Her second option, and the one she had lived by since she was thirteen, was what she was very good at. Never staying in one place for too long; keeping quiet; only surfacing during the day to pilfer food and water - and even that was dangerous, considering the smoking mess of the Faceless she had just vaporized. As a child she'd always been good at Hide 'n Seek. She had become immeasurably better at it as a young adult.

But it was her eighteenth birthday, and every girl on her birthday deserved to be spoilt. Even those girls left behind on worlds overrun by the forces of darkness, surely! _Especially_ those ones!

Katrys rested Luthox on her shoulder and let out a long frustrated sigh. She walked up to the smoking ruin of the Faceless and gave it one big kick, watching as it slid and tumbled down the pile of rubble.

_Damn_ them, she thought. Damn them all to hell! Can't they just have one day off from all the eating and killing, is that too much to ask? _Really_?

But they were already damned to hell. All of them. Even her, she guessed. What else could you name a place like this? The thought amused her and another one of those rare giggles overcame her. It echoed across the ruined shopping district even louder than the first. A lonely sound in the emptiness.

For a moment she wondered if she was not going mad. She had seen it before, down in the sewers when she had hidden out in the early days with survivors of the Imperial Guard. Men who had been tense for so long, their nerves frayed, shattered by all the horrors of war, suddenly breaking down into fits of hysterical laughter, or tears, and unable to stop; not even when the Commissar put his las-pistol to their heads. Not even when he was screaming at them to 'Be _silent_, in the Name of the _Emperor_!' But things got very quiet once he pulled the trigger.

Those had been the worst days. When laughter and whispered words meant certain death.

Maybe she would be lucky this time. Maybe the call of the Faceless had not reached the ears of its brethren, and maybe nothing was coming for her. But that was a sad joke. Fantasy! Nothing but over-imaginative, weepy, little girl fantasy!

For a moment, Katrys wondered if it was worth fighting for any more. Looking up into the turquoise skies, she relished in the warmth of a sun that had once been pure and normal, a heavenly body of fire and light, but was now dimming and transmogrifying into yet another entity of Chaos. It sat there above her, weeping what little blessed light it had left inside it. Perhaps it too wondered if it was all worth while fighting the inevitable.

She was so tired of it all. Tired of running, tired of moving from one district to the next, unable to settle in and make a home for herself, tired of butchering things that held no regard for life, not even their own, and yearned only for your flesh, your blood, your bones, and even your soul. Tired of feeling fear and anxiety _every_ single Emperor-be-damned day of her _life_!

What if she just gave up?

What if she just put up her weapon, let go of all her fears, and walked straight toward whatever it was they were sending at her right this very moment? She could do it. It would mean no longer running and hiding. It would be the end of fear... Or would it?

She recalled once, spying on a squad of Chaos soldiers. Turncoats who had once been members of the Peoples Defence of Orphregus, turned through choice or force into servants of the dark hordes. She had watched from the shadows of an overgrown backyard as one of the soldiers broke away from his companions and began to babble about how painful it all was, to be carrying their 'burden', and never being capable of feeling anything 'good and normal' ever again. The man had barely lasted a heartbeat longer. The squad leader's head had ripped open, like some macabre jack-in-the-box, and a black and terrible thing reached forth on questing tendrils and tore the man's throat out. Afterward the entire squad had feasted on the poor man's body, eating him raw like rabid dogs.

It was death or surrender. Survival just seemed to be a delay between the two.

But not _today_, Katrys assured herself. It's my birthday and I'm going to enjoy myself, and they can all go and bugger themselves!

Tell us, Katrys, what surprises do you think you'll be getting on this your eighteenth birthday? Well, if you don't mind my saying, probably the biggest surprise of all - a horrible DEATH! Not that it was a surprise. What would it be today: a swarm of babbling, mewling Nurglings, a Flamer come to lick your flesh and make it run, or a Screamer arcing down from the skies?

She needed something to remind her why she was still alive when everything and everyone around her was dead. She needed just a little piece of hope. So, turning her back on the corpse of the Faceless, she trekked off across the rubble to find it. She knew exactly where to go.

Big Silver lay exactly where she had left him five years before.

He looked like a giant discarded action toy. He lay where he had fallen, in between two large air-conditioning ducts on the roof of the Sunkiss Fair shopping car park. Facing upward, his mighty arms were still locked in that firm yet delicate embrace he had held her in as the world around them fell beneath the ascendency of a vast daemon horde that had blotted out sun and landscape with their number.

She made her way across to him. Slow and measured. Each step more reverential than the last, as though she dared not disturb the brave soul that had once sequestered inside Big Silver's mighty frame.

Up here on the car park rooftop she had a vantage point with a good view out over the town. From here she would see anything that was headed her way. Habs sprawled outward, block after block after block, most of them collapsed into rubble, all the way out to the hills and the bare mountains beyond.

She could even see Lake Serenity from here, though it no longer looked serene. It was rather more like a boiling cauldron filled with a foul soupy broth. Things lived in there now. She had seen their long coiled bodies swimming in slow circles, chasing the last of the fresh water fish. And the hills and mountains had lost most of their foliage, until nothing looked at all like it had when she was thirteen. Some of those mountains even smouldered, made active and volcanic where once they had stood ice capped with a verdant skirting of dark green pines.

Katrys curtsied before the monstrous form of the Space Marine. She bowed her head and gazed longingly over the length of his prodigious frame.

Big Silver was the most beautiful thing she had ever known, as far as Katrys was concerned. He was the only thing in the world that had not changed. Well, maybe not the only thing. Butter-Twinks were still the same, nor had they lost their appeal, that was if you could still find a packet amongst the ruins.

From neck to toe the mighty Space Marine warrior was decked out in gleaming silver and frost-white power armour. Upon his immense shoulder guards was emblazoned the standard of his Chapter: a silver fist gripped tightly, beneath an unrecognizable constellation of nine stars. Here and there the silver ceramite plates and white trimming had been scored by las fire and other projectiles, and burned and melted from deadly organic weaponry. It had been rent open in places too, by claws not of this world. At least, not from the world it had once been. And it was due to these mortal wounds he had fallen. His helmet, however, was not white or silver, but a decorous midnight blue, with baleful black eyes that glared up at the sky in search of war, even in death.

Katrys' breath quickened and she crouched low, gasping.

It happened every time she came to see him. A very sudden, and very violent episode would overcome her senses as her body recalled the day her entire world had changed...


	3. Chapter 3

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: Okay, so here comes Chapter 3, and this is where the fluff starts intruding on the plotline. I hope I'm doing it justice. I'd be happy to hear any critique on it. I stayed up a little bit too late for this one and my mind was reeling at the end, I might even hate it when I see it in the morning, who knows...  
**

* * *

**{ ..III.. }**

It was almost five years to the day since it had happened. The Great Change. She recalled it as clear and cold as a bolt through the brain.

_Katrys is thirteen and happy. Probably the happiest she will ever know. Her family are around her, Mum and Dad either side with the grocery bags going _swish-swish_ against their legs, and her two older brothers racing ahead out into the open air of the rooftop carpark, their arms full of bright, colourful boxes with ribbons. They are rushing to the family car to load up the boot before going home. They even rented one of Katrys' favourite kids-vids for the whole family to watch, though Tamlyn thinks those vids are only for '_babies'_!_

_Dad and Mum are laughing about last night's dinner, how Dad, who had cooked again which was always a gamble, had botched it up big time by putting too much xillimus clove in the curry. The whole family had raced to the fridge to drink milk, or juice, or whatever they could to cool down their palates. They had ended up getting take-away, but Tamlyn and Dad had dared each other to see how much more they could eat without crying. Tamlyn had won._

_As they walked out into the open air carpark, the sun beamed cheerfully down on them, and the sky was the most pure blue she would ever know. _

_That was why it had been so surprising. It had happened on such a beautiful mid Spring day, and with all these people around, wandering in and out of the mall, putting away their bags of groceries and shopping, and chatting as if there was not a single thing wrong in all the Imperium. _

_Of course she had learned the stories at college of what was out there beyond the fringes of her solar system, and who protected them from it. It had been all over the vid-net about how their world and several others stood on the threshold between the Imperium and the Eye of Terror. But they were well protected by the forces of the Emperor. Nobody ever thought anything would actually happen. Not like it was about to._

_A thunderclap!_

_People jumped. A woman shrieked and her baby, locked in his stroller, began to cry. _

_Then, looking around at each other, all the people suddenly felt foolish, as though they had all just got a silly scare from the most ridiculous of sounds. Some of them began to laugh in embarrassment, pointing out their reactions and glancing up at the bright blue sky._

_"What _was_ that?" A woman asked her mother from the next car over. "By the sweat of His Throne, I almost leapt out of my skin!"_

_Katrys' mother laughed and nodded her agreement. All the adults seemed to think it was such a silly thing; in their heads they explained it away as the backfire of some old car, or the ancient ventilation pipes popping again in the lower levels of the carpark. The pipes did that on occasion when the gas built up too high. _

_But Katrys and her brothers were not so easily settled; and neither was the poor infant in the stroller. The kids could feel something awful in the air, though not one of them was able to voice it. It was just a feeling, deep down in your guts._

_A foul smell swamped the carpark then, like nothing in this world. It made Katrys gag._

_"It's okay, honey." Her father said to her then, ruffling her hair in that way she hated and loved at the same time. Though right now she loved it. Any assurance was more than welcome. "Probably just the gas pipes gone off the blink. What a noise, it even got me jumpin' outta my-" _

_-He stopped talking. That was the worst part. Because those were the last words she ever heard cross her father's lips._

_Another thunderclap! Though this time she saw the lightning, amongst other things. But it was not like any lightning she had ever seen before. _

_Lightning didn't cut sideways through the air like that. Lightning wasn't supposed to rip through people and cars and reinforced rockcrete walls. But this one did. And it was followed by another and yet another. Other things came with the lightning, bounding and leaping with mesmerizing speed. The sounds ripped through the air and people began to scream._

_Real screams. Not like the ones she heard on all those horror-vids her brothers would sneak into the house for them to watch when their parents were away. No, these screams made you sick to your toes. They made you feel the pain of whoever was making such a sad, horrible noise, till you wished you would never hear it again. Bone ripping screams that started off shrill and high, went inhumanly low, and then suddenly cut off with a sharp wet crack!_

_Then a terrible, hideous roar broke across the city and there was no mistaking it was not of this world. That only a beast larger than the buildings themselves could have the voice to make such a sound._

_"Emperor's blood!" a man cried. "Run, everybody ruuuuuuuuunnnn!"_

_His cries were cut off as a tiny horde of chittering monstrosities fell upon him tearing his flesh from his bones. _

_Then Katrys watched as her father was catapulted into the sky. Something had coiled around him, a huge black tentacle, and snatched him from the carpark as though he were nothing but a plaything. This man who had been nothing short of a giant to her, so indomitable with his strong hands, big black beard and fierce grey eyes. She remembered his face, floating away from her, racked with pain and white with terror; his arms reaching helplessly out for hers. Then he was gone. Forever._

_She remembered seeing blood. So much blood.  
_

_It was true. The stories about what lay outside their solar system were all true. They weren't protected like the politicians had promised. There was no protection from something that could just materialize out from a bright sunny day and start devouring people, burning them and tearing them limb from limb.  
_

_Katrys was bereft of any sense, left in a mute docility. She knew bad things were happening around her and that people were dying, but there was nothing the thirteen year old could do to assimilate the experience into something cogent for her young, naiive mind. Like her brothers she stood frozen and cold in the sunlight._

_All her pretty birthday presents lay scattered across the rockcrete parking bay in pools of blood, and ragged chunks of flesh and bone. She would discover much later that the presents contained everything she had ever desired in the world as a thirteen year old, but she would never have use for them after this. _

_Her mother was screaming hysterically, crouched down beside the car while her two brother stood transfixed by the things chittering and howling around them. Katrys wondered why her mother was not protecting them. How could she be that way, and not carry them away from all the horror? It had been a selfish thought and one she was ashamed of. But it had marked her from that day onwards._

_We are all nothing but buckets of flimsy flesh and blood!_

_Creatures swooped down from the sky. They landed on people and more blood sprayed the air. Until it was raining a fine, wet crimson mist. The creatures screamed so loud that the impossible harmonics of their daemonic vocal cords made your bones feel as though they might vibrate out of your skin. The sound turned your bowels to water._

_It was a dance of utter destruction. Like those old doco-vids she watched with her father, of the wild, with all the animals hunting one another and feasting on each other's entrails. She had always been fascinated by them. But now humanity was on the lower links of a food-chain she had never comprehended and it was indescribable to even imagine the things she saw that day._

_They were brightly coloured the Screamers that flew down upon them. So vivid as to seem electric. But if you looked too long at those colours they began to do things to your mind, like making you want to tear your own eyes out from your head in the hope to never see them again. _

_A Screamer was like a manta ray, maybe a little bigger. But these swam through the air, and their bodies rippled with poisonous spines and bladed fins._

_Everyone was falling and screaming and dying. Men, women, children – no one was safe from the daemons. _

_-Across from her the stroller stands empty, the bawling infant is gone!-_

_Katrys could not recall when it happened but the sky was one moment blue, and the next full of ships. Drop ships, military transports, Thunderhawk gunships (which she would learn more about later on), and other craft. Great balls of energy shot up from somewhere below and several ships were destroyed by them, careening away in smoke trails across the bright blue sky. _

_The Thunderhawk gunships, which to her looked just as evil as the daemons around her, circled to land. One of the huge vehicles actually landed nearby squashing the family car as if it were a soda can. She realized then that her mother and brothers were missing. _

_Something charged toward her. She would have been dead if not for the huge, hull-mounted heavy bolters of the Thunderhawk. _

_The bolters erupted so loudly that she toppled onto her rump like a rag doll. The thing that had been coming at her, all red spines and long spidery legs, was instantly atomized from existence.  
_

_Her ears rang like clarion bells and she felt a wave of nausea overcome her.  
_

_A hatch opened in the rear of the Thunderhawk and a squad of gigantic men in silver and white armour stormed out firing into the foul things leaping and chittering around them. Their weapons sounded almost as horrible as the daemons. Plasma guns flared and fired searing bolts of sun-like energy that vaporized everything before them and also sent out waves of heat as hot as a furnace even from behind. Bolters roared like thunder and lascannons howled and whined, obliterating all those around them. A war was waging and it would go down in the annals of Imperial Warfare, of lost hope and a last ditch effort to save the innocent souls of Orphregus from utter annihilation._

_Big Silver had grabbed her then. Broken away from his squad._

_Her family was gone. Everyone gone. And he held her like a little precious doll in one arm while his bolter in the other bellowed out a mighty disc of flame that sent high-explosive bolts into the rushing daemons. Katrys doubted she would ever get her hearing back. And she was sure this gigantic armoured beast that held her in its whirring mechanical arms was bound to kill her soon enough._

_Then something rose up behind them. It was Katrys who noticed it first._

_Every day after that one Katrys would curse herself and her infantile cowardice for not warning the Space Marine of the danger. Not that he would have heard her above the din, but she might have at least tried. _

_Hind sight was a cruel judge and jury._

_A great fiend rose up behind them. Katrys helplessly looked up at it, all the way up to its terrible visage. And something inside her collapsed, never to return to her. Just looking at the entity broke her mind apart._

_It was all red, ruby red, blood red. Standing upon four mighty hooved legs with bright white spines erupting from its hinges. Its torso was gigantic and shimmered with a virulent energy all of its own. Great arms ending in tremendous saw-toothed blades hung low to either side. And its face, she would never forget that face._

_Sweet blood of the Emperor, that horrible face!_

_It wore a helm of glass, or what looked to be glass, atop its head. You could see right through it. Yet inside there was no ghastly face to be seen, no terrible daemonic features. It was worse, for, crawling wildly about within the confines of that hellish helm were the thousand tortured souls of all those the creature had eviscerated and murdered. Souls that pressed themselves, each as unidentifiable as the next, screaming and howling pitifully against the glass._

_But it was the tail that struck the marine. It struck him from behind and with unimaginable force, powered by muscles brutalized from eons spent in the baffling physical laws of the Warp. It ripped right through Big Silver's armour as if it were paper, and though the Space Marine did not make a noise, she felt his body quake and fall slack beneath her._

_As they fell to the bloody ground the brave Space Marine turned his bolter on the daemon and fired. Explosions tore across the daemon's mighty frame and it toppled backward with an soul shredding howl._

_Then Big Silver had used his gauntlet to tear a hole in the wall of the air-conditioning duct beside them._

_"Run and hide, little one!" Big Silver commanded her in a voice as deep and resonant as what she imagined her Guardian Angel's should have been. "And do thus until you find help. Seek out the Guard. They will protect you and get you off this world. Take this." He handed her a round disc of strange golden wood, flecked with black metal. It reminded her of a cogwheel though the grooves were smoother and more intricate. "RUN!"_

_And he had pushed her through the opening until she plummeted all the way down to the basement…_


	4. Chapter 4

**{… IV …}**

Now Katrys stood over Big Silver, five years after the event. Half of the open air carpark had collapsed all the way down to ground level, a precarious ramp of rubble lending access to the roof of the demolished mall up to where he lay. Only something thoroughly unimaginable and spawned from the Warp could have wreaked such havoc.

All the blood had dried up and blown away. All the bodies of the men, women and children who had died here had been carried off long ago by marauding daemon spawn, or the lowly scavengers of her own world: like the vultures and rats, and the noxious gilly-hoppers, that now reigned in the kingdom of the wild where once they had hidden away, fearful of discovery. Now it was Katrys who hid away and scavenged, turned into vermin upon her own home world.

There were the burnt out husks of family sedans scattered across what was left of the parking stations. Against one wall an overturned chimera lay busted open like a giant shoebox, all charred black with its wiry innards poking up at the turquoise sky; and several crashed drop ships littered across what was left of the rooftop carpark in shattered heaps. There were a few skeletal remains scattered about of both human and daemon origin, picked clean and gleaming brightly beneath the sun; and everywhere you looked there were thousands upon thousands of shell casings and dark black scorch marks.

It had been a brutal war, waged hard and fast. But it was the Imperium of Man that had lost. Not at all like what the Deacons had vowed in their long, ireful sermons at the Cathedral, or the Enlistment Presenters in the conscripto-mercials for the Imperial Guard had promised with confident words even in the face of all those odds. Even the mighty Space Marines had been beaten back, having to leave behind one of their battle-brothers against everything they believed and were sworn by.

Big Silver lay here amongst it all. Though the grievous rents in his power armour gaped wide and dark beneath the sunlight, his long dead carapace still looked fearsome enough, the ocular lenses in his helmet angled sharply into an eternal baleful stare, as if he were but lying in wait to ambush the next foe to blunder by.

A parchment attached to his breastplate fluttered in the cool breeze coming in off the mountains. It snapped madly about like a soul trying to escape its mortal coil; the only thing animate of the marine's huge frame. The words and intricate sigils written across it's dry crinkled surface were unrecognizable to Katrys' eyes, though she imagined it must have bespoken great knowledge and power in the litany of those delicately scribed letters. It reminded her of her duty as an Imperial. It reminded her that she was still human, and being thus, was the last soldier of the Emperor's Will upon this world. The crest upon the parchment's header was the black stamp of the Imperial Eagle, and the footer a golden seal of a snarling skull.

"I'm eighteen today," Katrys said quietly to the dead Space Marine. A sad smile flickered across her lips. "I don't have any birthday presents yet, but I did kill a Faceless just now. Hardly even had to look, it was so easy. I'm getting better!"

She always spoke like this when she came up here to visit him; with the jagged, flattened abstract panorama of her razed city around her. It still felt like he might yet respond to her words at any moment. Laying there, his eyes staring right through her, as though at any moment he might just sit up, nod sagely and answer her.

"I could've protected you if I knew what I know now. But I didn't, I was too little, too stupid. Just a girl." She wiped at the moisture in her eyes. "Emperor's breath, look at me? It might not seem like it right now but I can hit a bounding gilly-hopper with a single shot from two thousand meters. Sagan was one of the best snipers in the Guard, and he said no one had a rifle like this one." She stopped, sniffing a little and shaking her head at the memory. "Sagan was the first Guard to find me after you threw me down into the basement. You were right, though, everything you said. I ran, they found me and they kept me safe; for a little while at least. My brother was with them too. They taught us a lot while we were in hiding down there under the city; before we were hunted out. I learnt a lot about guns - 'weapons' I should say. 'If you want to be a Guard one day, Kat, you're going to have to start calling it your weapon' Sagan'd tell me all the time."

She looked into Big Silver's unwavering gaze. "I learnt about you too, and the Adeptus Astartes. I think you would be very proud of me and how far I've come. Not that you'd say it. Sagan always said your kind had no feelings of pride or love or anything like what normal people feel. That you're all just killing machines for the Emperor. But I don't believe him."

A sudden piercing cry echoed off the cracked rockcrete walls of the carpark and Katrys' blood ran cold. The sound peeled away into a frustrated roar far off in the distance – though not far enough for her liking.

"Emperor's Blood!" she hissed. "They could have at least sent me something easier!"

She climbed atop the air-conditioning ducts to survey the horizon.

Two Screamers were circling above Cheligas Park less than a kilometre away. She could see their flat electric-blue bodies banking lazily around in an ever-widening circumvolution of reconnaissance, their long, bladed tails slashing from side to side in agitation, as they searched. She was quite certain she knew what they were searching for.

Leaping back down beside the dead Space Marine, she pulled the small circular wooden amulet he had given her that ruinous day. The scrawling inlays of black metal were hot in her palm and the object vibrated mildly with a life of its own.

"I don't know what this is, or what it does." She said to her fallen saviour. "But I think you knew, and I think it was for _your_ protection. I have no way to thank you for such a sacrifice. Though what I do have to offer is what I have learned since then. And now I am an adult it is time for me to stop hiding, and do something as worthy as you once did."

She checked the power levels on her lasrifle. Luthox was pretty low. 'In the red' as the Guardsmen who had protected her and her brother would say. Too low to deal with a pair of Screamers at that range. Not that she had ever dealt with even a single Screamer before, but she imagined she would need to switch the bolt intensity to '-Extremis-' in order to hurt them at that range. And that would flatten out the weapon quick-smart. She would have to throw the las-battery pack onto a fire for a day or two to spark it up again. That's what the Guard used to do whenever they got low and had no spare clips, resourceful bunch they were – though it did not save them in the end. But there was no time to wait for the clip to burn its way back up 'into the green' with two Screamers in the air searching for her. And making a fire was becoming more and more foolhardy with the increasing amount of Chaos patrols marching throughout the city.

One day they'll all just set up here, she thought, and I'll still be living underground like a sewer rat, striving not to be seen; while they're all dancing and laughing and living it up in their big vile palaces, and eating their demonic cuisine and drinking blood wine, and torturing one another.

It's your birthday, she thought. She could not get the idea out of her head, no matter how hard she tried, or how mortally ridiculous it seemed. You have every right to enjoy your first day as a legitimate Emperor-forsaken adult!

That got her to thinking about the Chimera PC ruptured open behind her – and all the unused ammunition it still held in its stores. She had seen Sagan do some wild things with spare ammunition cartridges, things she had never practiced on her own; though she was fairly certain she could be just as imaginative if she put her mind to it. After all, Sagan had taught her almost everything he knew in the eight months they had spent together - before the Tzeentch Flamer had got him – and he was one of the best.

It seemed like a better time than any to start experimenting. Katrys grinned wildly as she set about collecting the things she would need. It was a maddening exhilarating sensation – to finally take action into your hands and fight back at the things that had kept you down, under the ground, for way too long. It was bound to bring more hell to her doorstep than ever before; but looking across at Big Silver the thought of dying in glorious battle suddenly seemed more right than anything she had ever done in her life to this day.

Today she was eighteen. And today she was going to collect some birthday presents. The best kind ever! Better than anything she had ever desired at thirteen.

"_Happy birthday to me_," Katrys sang to herself, quite sweetly, as she raised the lasrifle to her shoulder and sighted down the magnified scope, just like Sagan had trained her to do. "_Happy birthday to me_…"

Luthox barked twice in her hands. Katrys watched with some pride as the bolts flashed across the sky and struck one of the Screamers. They barely nicked it, but they definitely got its attention. There was a deadly fell cry and the daemon spawn shot up higher into the air, searching wildly about for its attacker.

It spotted her on the rooftop carpark. One human girl, ripe for the reaving for its dark father Tzeentch. A belting scream pierced the sky and it shot downward for the kill; behind it, its companion swooped in pursuit bellowing aloud its own ravenous hunger.

"_Happy… birthday… dear…. Katryssssss…. And the _Emperor_ toooooo_!"

* * *

**AUHTOR'S NOTE: I really felt like stopping it there, right there. Something about going all cosmic noir on the story. But then I really wanted to enjoy what happens next. So stay posted, cause there's about to be a hell of a lot of action comin'!**


	5. Chapter 5

**{ ..V.. }**

The Screamers of Tzeentch were outraged.

They had been attacked! Worst of all, with what little capacity they had to rationalize through their horned elongated cranial beds, their pride had been struck a deliberate and extemporaneous blow.

For something so lowly and meek, as a flimsy human – _a food thing to be devoured_! – to somehow pinpoint and attack them before they had even sensed its presence was unthinkable to such a creature! _Impossible_! It was a double dose of pain. But the assault on their ego was far worse than the damage done by a couple of lucky shots from a measly little lasgun.

They shot upward into the sky like twin bolts of burning blue lightning, twirling in vertical defensive spirals to avoid any further attacks. They shred the air with their torturous cries, bellowing with all the rage and hunger of the starved, deprived and insane. _They_ were not ducks to be shot at. _They_ were the Screamers of Tzeentch. They would find this foolish human and tear it into a million little pieces, and scatter its bleeding carcass across the despoiled landscape they had come to know as home – _no, no, no, no NO_!

Firstly, they would _PLAY_!

It would be surpassing entertainment for their twisted daemonic intellect to toy with such a fleshy bauble than to kill it outright. For it had been a long, long while since they had met with the little men and women who fought for the glory of their little Corpse God. _Yes_, it would be good to sharpen their teeth once more. For the war had moved on and Tzeentch's lieutenants had seen fit to leave these two Screamers behind, along with other shattered squads and companies of the Chaos Daemons; for they were the survivors of those who had failed, and this posting was their punishment for that failure.

This might redeem some of the respect their dark flock had squandered in battle. To destroy the last human straggler of their new world. Tzeentch might be tickled by such a turning of the Fates; especially if it ended cruel and hopeless; lasting, but in the end, sudden and final.

The first Screamer, with scorch marks from the las-bolts still smouldering across its side, targeted the shape of the flimsy girl thing. It caught sight of long fair hair, a shoulder and chin, arms akimbo.

_FLESH_! Its mind screamed, and from its gaping maw erupted a wondrous roar of glee.

It did not stop to conjecture why it could not smell the human. Its mind did not function that way. Humans had always been easy to smell, like roasting meat from a blazing pyre, though this one smelled of nothing at all. Smell did not matter when it was time to kill.

The Screamer tucked back its fins and barrel rolled into a predatory swoop. Streamers of phosphorescent drool tapered away behind it.

The second Screamer coughed and hacked out in beastly excitement as it floated high in the sky, ready to dive in on the enemy if its companion were to fail. It sounded like it was choking on fire. The plasma glands in the sides of its throat flexed and strained, readying themselves to release their load onto anything it saw fit to bite driving the daemon's need to tear through something strong and ungainly, like reinforced rockcrete or an adamantine hull. Anything for the joy of ravaging.

Katrys felt a surge of terror rise up through her belly. It moved aqueously like a cammodo-snake striking out from its trapdoor. She grit her teeth against it and did what she did best. She waited.

Her hands locked around the trigger handles of the Godwin Pattern Twin-Linked Heavy Bolters pintle-mounted to the side of the overturned Chimera. She could just access them through a rusted and battle worn hatchway opening between the APC's busted tracks. There would be little to no rotation for the weapon to move, without aid of the vehicle in motion, but she had already considered that.

Weapons like these lay scattered all around, in burnt out hulks or atop abandoned vehicles, untouched and undamaged after all these years, though she had never imagined she would need to operate one. Neither had the PDF troops who had pillaged the countryside now they had turned their allegiance to the ruinous powers of Chaos. The traitors who had avoided joining lifelong service to the Imperial Guard for fear of ending up on the front lines, were now slaves beneath far worse masters, leaving behind a great cache of heavier weapons and artillery behind they either knew not how to handle, or had no time to pilfer before they were force marched to the one place they had spent their entire lives avoiding. Though now it would be to face their own kind on the fields of war, with unthinkable horrors marching behind them, urging them on through pain and terror to their howling deaths.

The moulded rubber pistol grips so big in her small hands gave her a sense of sure command. There was another of those strange seals, like the one on Big Silver's breastplate, fluttering just below the front sighting rail of the heavy bolters. It's intricately scrawled letters made no sense to her, though they did lend her a curious comfort. Men had fought in here, and died in here. She had always wondered how it might feel to use such a devastating weapon as this. She was about to find out.

The Screamer hurtled down from the bright skies howling like a Bombard shell. Its great jaws opened wide and its long tusks thrust forward hungry for the kill of the human girl below it. All its thoughts were hunger, its entire fabric orchestrated for the destruction of flesh and bone.

Katrys was mesmerized by the creature's herculean speed and voracity, the hideous beauty of its skin, its multitude of hateful eyes, and the tremor of its battle cry. Yet she waited. She felt she had been waiting for this moment all her life. This one defining diamond twinkling in time, where all her pent-up rage and despair finally had a channel through which to be unleashed.

The Screamer pulled up from its dive, just before it could crash through the rockcrete driveway beneath its target. It stretched out its wide fins and a tremendous cracking noise split the air thundering off the car park walls. Its maw distended open and its long tail lashed forward at the form of the human girl below.

Tail blade met body and the human figure was severed in half as the creature dropped on top of it. Its jaws cracked greedily open to devour both halves whole. Too bad it had not played with the human bauble before killing it. It was in joyous frenzy.

Katrys' breath pumped up and down like a trapped field mouse. The Screamer thrashed across the rockcrete parking bay in front of her, ripping the wooden shop mannequin into sawdust. She had dragged it from one of her mother's favourite stores in the mall, the same one her and her father used to play hide and seek in whilst their mother tried on a million different dresses. A platinum blonde wig flew into the air and the clothing was rent apart in long deathly shreds as the creature had its way. Thank the Emperor for fashion!

There was no more time to think. No more time to wait. She bared her teeth into a wide snarl, her pretty eyes glimmering with unadulterated zeal, and she screamed as her fingers pulled back on the two triggers.

As if in chorus to the girl's war cry the twin heavy bolters roared aloud with the wrath of Imperial fury. Katrys and bolters alike were tools to His will. She could almost feel the Emperor watching her from whatever far away place he resided in space and time beyond and within the Warp; a bolt of pure light in the chaotic swarm of lunatic colours - a distant flash of pleasure in His eyes, a twinkling of hope for His lost child.

The vibrations of the pounding heavy bolters made her arms feel like they were being assaulted by a swarm of hornets and her bones shaken into dust; yet she held down the triggers with all her might and focused on the kill.

The Screamer had no time to scream. After obliterating the mannequin it had half a second to register its mistake before the bolters erupted. In that time it managed to draw in a portion of its murderous breath before hundreds of high-explosive rounds tore through its flesh and innards, ripping it apart almost as savagely as it had done the wooden dummy. Black blood steamed the air, hissing when it touched the rockcrete driveway as if on a hot plate. Its head exploded. The daemon's body was flayed into gobbets and fillets of tainted meat scattered across the car park.

Katrys leaned back off the triggers. The twin-mounted bolters steamed heavily from their muzzles. She breathed deep, in and out, staring wide-eyed at her work, her mind racing. She knew full well this was not the end of the danger. But she wanted nothing more than to savor the death of her enemy.

The scream shook her like a thunderclap of doom. It was so powerful that she thought she would faint right over the bolters' sight-rail. It came from behind her, right where the gaping cavity opened into the ruined chassis of the Chimera.

Emperor's Blood, but it had got there so soon!

The Screamer's huge sister hunched there, glaring in at her, like a cat might look in on a mouse tucked into the corner of a doll's house. Its twenty-three sets of glittering eyes held her own fearful gaze, each pupil dilated with such malevolence she wondered why it had not killed her already. Then its jaws split wide and all the air inside the shattered APC whooshed into the mighty cavity of the daemon's gullet.

Katrys did not wait around. She launched herself forward, out over the top of the heavy bolters, and toppled the ten feet to the driveway below.

A tremendous roar rocked the car park, and a blast of furnace heat enveloped her. She had seen Screamers chew through the hulls of Leman Russ tanks, and she knew the Chimera's armour was certainly no match for it either - not without its guns blazing.

She had been victorious for less than a few seconds, and now she was hunted again. But it had been worth it - even for that mere blink in time.

The girl ran like the wind as the Screamer chewed through what was left of the Chimera behind her. She snatched up Luthox, felt the heat wave of another onrushing belch of Melta breath, and dived head first back down through the air-conditioning vent Big Silver had thrown her down all those years ago.

The Screamer roared mightily at the sky. It would do everything in its power to avenge its fallen sister.

_Everything. The human would not trick them a second time!_


	6. Chapter 6

**{ ..VI.. }**

It was pitch black.

Katrys ran as hard as she was physically able. The terrible roar of the Screamer followed her every step as the daemon sundered through rockcrete and metal with its Warp Jaws to get at her.

One of her three defining talents: running, hiding and sniping. If she had to think up one other skill she was good at she guessed it was memory retention. She was excellent at remembering things. Her father, may the Emperor's light shine on him, had found his daughter very resourceful when it came to forgotten birthdays, shopping lists, and pretty much everything he forgot he could turn to Katrys for the answer.

In the darkness she knew exactly where every slippery piece of shale fell to snap her ankle, where every serrated edge of metal protruded from the murk to cut at her face or disembowel her. She ran across the shattered culvert of lightless tunnels and caves beneath Sunkiss Fair as fast as she would along any paved road above ground in broad daylight.

The bolthole was close by. She used the rat-run to her advantage to get her there as fast as possible. No one wanted a Screamer after them.

Sagan said she was the fastest thirteen year old he had ever known, and a quick learner. He said she possessed one of the brightest and most curious minds he had ever had the pleasure of knowing. It was a rare compliment from him, and he meant it. Sagan never spoke a word of encouragement unless it was due, and she cherished him for that; over the short time she had known him.

Like when she had asked him about her brother, knowing full well in her own heart what must have come of him and the guardsmen he had disappeared with. And Sagan had told her without a moment's hesitation that her brother was dead, or captured – the latter being much worse than the former. Sagan had firmly assured Katrys there was no chance of survival. He neither apologised for it, nor softened the blow in any way. He just told her with the same respect he would his fellow Guardsmen. She knew he was right too. She had seen what the daemons had done to her family, her people, the Imperial Guard and even the indomitable Adeptus Astartes. Her brother had been strong, but never quick. She hoped the daemons _had_ killed him. It was a cruel hope, but anything was better than living under their Ruinous tenure. _Anything_.

Katrys' boots thumped fiercely across the rubble-strewn culvert, which had once been the foundation and pride of Sunkiss Fair. The sound of her scrabbling crashed off the walls into the nooks and crannies of the dark, but she did not slow her progress. If anything, she moved quicker.

Behind her the Screamer bellowed wildly. There was an ear shredding explosion and the sound of something unnaturally capable tearing through stone and metal, as a frenzied dog might search for a lost bone buried in sand. It was after her, and it would not stop until it had ripped her to shreds!

"Boltholes and rat-runs," Sagan had told her one day, when they had stopped inside a large sewer cistern under the city, the last few survivors of a world gone mad, where they would camp for the night. "That's what you need to survive down here."

She had looked at him oddly and he had laughed.

"Always the curious little fox aren't you, Kat." She liked how he called her that. That's what her brothers used to call her. When she asked him what he was talking about he had pointed out the cistern and the ladders leading up to the daemon infested streets above them.

He always smiled like this. A casual lop-sided smile, even when in danger.

"You need to find bolt holes you can disappear in and out of, and rat runs to get you between them. Guerilla warfare its called. It means Little War. You hit the enemy on one side, vanish before his eyes and then hit him again from another. Keep doing this, taking away his resources along the way, and, if you do it fast and hard enough, a small army can defeat one that is much, much larger." She had liked that. The way he talked so freely with her about things usually a man would only share with fellow soldiers. When she had told him this he had laughed again. "You might be thirteen, little fox. But you are a soldier already. You just don't know it yet."

She knew she was still alive not just because of Big Silver's mysterious medallion, but because she had also listened to every word Sagan had ever spoken to her. And she had followed it through to this day.

She deeply missed Sagan's cool, laconic bluntness, with that strange rolling accent he possessed. Somewhere from a place called Cadia he had told her, though she had never learnt about such a world at school. He had said that Cadia was a world of severities, but great honour. You were born to fight as a Cadian, he said, it was in your blood, in your very genetic make up. Cadian children grew up armed with lasguns and hellguns. What better mentor could she have had?

The darkness can be your friend, he had assured her. A light source could very well end up getting you killed. So together they had practiced rat running in the dark, from one bolthole to the next. After Sagan had died she had continued with his training, getting better and better with every day that passed, clearing obstacles she thought she might miss, leaving others she knew she could use against the enemy.

She knew every bolt hole, hidey spot and cave network in a twenty kilometre radius; and even a few places out toward the Lake and hills – though there was more open ground out that way and far too dangerous because of it.

Like right now. She knew if she sprinted as hard as she could push herself that she would reach the B5 elevator shaft within a couple of minutes. It could either take her down to the Service Ways where she had first met up with Sagan and his Guardsmen, or, if she climbed the cables fast enough, it would take her back up into the sunshine to the rooftop at the south side of the carpark. Behind where she had left. Behind the Screamer.

She was actually going to do this, she realised. She could not believe it. But she had never felt more certain about anything in years!

Her boots skipped across the rubble where memory was as bright as daylight. Three rockcrete posts she had to leap over, and did so with ease; feeling the last post whisk by a little too close to her kneecap. She leapt through the gaping hole of the B5 elevator shaft, nothing but a black space within the blackness, and caught hold of the old steel hoist cables. They twanged and groaned but held true and she climbed them expeditiously.

When Katrys surfaced back up into the daylight through a shattered fire escape, her shoulders were screaming agony and her hands were bleeding. But she immediately crawled low onto her stomach, the las rifle over her back, crawling forward with every care she could take, back toward Big Silver and the air-conditioning ducts. Big Silver's amulet dug into her thigh as she crawled along, but she ignored it.

For the moment the tables had turned. She watched with a macabre amusement as the Screamer wrenched and writhed its huge flapping bright blue body against the large air-con ducts, howling down into the darkness after her. Its tusks thrashed away at the metal and every so often a bellowing flash of plasma would erupt and the hole grew wider and wider. But the stupid creature would be digging for hours to get down to where she had just been.

No, she corrected herself. Sagan would have kicked her ass for thinking that way. "Not stupid, never think your enemy stupid," he had said to her. "Never forget what the daemons did to your people. They are not stupid. They are dangerous and cunning. The moment you forget that will be the day you die."

Katrys unslung Luthox and checked the battery level. It was dangerously low. She did not like the look of those two small red bars on the side of the battery clip, not one bit. But there was nothing else at hand. All her salvaged equipment was scattered across twenty kilometres of rat runs beneath the city. The nearest she could think of was well over a ten minute hike away. She only came to Sunkiss Fair to pay her respects to Big Silver, to cleanse her mind of all the madness that had built up around her, she had not expected blundering into all out war.

Not on her birthday. After all, she'd had no contact with a daemon or Chaos soldier within sight or hearing for over a month. Now she had shot two daemons and was being hunted by another.

_Correction_. The tables were turned. So long as there was power in her las rifle's battery clip, she was not the hunted. Not anymore.

She flicked the Bolt Intensity switch over to '-EXTREMIS-'. Luthox vibrated in her hands with the thrill of the power he was about to unleash. Very, very carefully she crawled up off her stomach and slowly got to her feet, raising the las rifle to her shoulder, sighting in on the daemon.

The Screamer scrabbled, chewed and howled at the mangled air duct. A veritable mountain of rockcrete rubble it had been dug up behind it. Big Silver lay there beside the daemon, immobile and silent, considered nothing but just another chunk of refuse left behind from the war.

Katrys did not want to go any closer to the Screamer, but she had no choice. Not if she wanted to get this right.

She took step after step, quiet as a ghost, edging closer to the raving daemon, with Luthox pressed firmly up against her cheek, with one pretty grey eye peering down the scope targeting the daemon's back. Its hideously coloured flesh made her vision swim and her gut clench in nausea.

Two shots, she thought. That's all I need. One for the tail with its hideous blades running up the length of it, that would incapacitate the daemon somewhat. The other shot was for its head, or body, whichever came first.

_Emperor's Will, grant me just two shots…. Please!_

The tail was a hard target to hold. The daemon thrashed it from side to side in agitation. But whenever it roared aloud down into the duct, its tail would strike out above it like a scorpion sting.

Katrys waited and held back her heaving stomach. She was close enough to smell the beast. It smelled of burnt things, fused plastic burnt things, and a reek of spore she hoped she would be able to wash from her senses. The malodorous stench crawled inside her.

The Screamer roared and Katrys fired.

Luthox kicked like a horse in her arms. The red searing bolt that erupted from the las rifle was thrice as wide as any ordinary beam and tremendously bright. In 'extremis' the bolt shrilled ominously across the carpark, cooking the air in its wake. Though this was a smell she preferred above most others.

The Screamer's tail blasted open along one side like a rotten sausage and hung uselessly behind it, the blades slithering benignly across the rockcrete driveway. The daemon flashed about and howled at the sky in confusion. The long tusks erupting from its long cranial bed and fins wavered like trembling fingers, flexing and crawling along its length. Its twenty-three sets of eyes locked in on her, with pupils narrowed through pain and hatred.

"Come and get it, bitch!" Katrys snarled.

The Screamer hovered precariously into the air and levelled its gaze on her. Black blood gushed from the wound of its broken tail, but it did not appear to be one bit removed from taking her head off. All it wanted was _human girl meat_.

The girl took aim and sighted right in the centre of that hump of unpleasant eyes. She grinned devilishly as the creature reared upward and pulled down on the trigger.

Luthox was silent.

The trigger clicked. Nothing came out except a soft gasp of heated air.

"Emperor be damned!" Katrys shouted. "Why now, why _now_!"

The Screamer screamed and the sound sent Katrys toppling onto her back, her mind swimming with panic. Then the daemon flew at her.

Liquid blue lightning, flashing forward, already too close for comfort. Katrys pushed Luthox ahead of her as a last ditch effort to put something between her and the daemon's awful jaws.

_This will be the end of the nightmare_, she thought in the nano second before the Screamer launched atop her. _This will be the end of fear_…


	7. Chapter 7

**Thank you all who have read thus far, and all who have thrown in their support. It is dearly appreciated, and I promise you that the story does have an end, and possibly soon. Anticlere, as I'm fresh out of augmetic gloves, here's Chapter 7.  
**

* * *

**{ ..VII.. }**

**sshhcHRrrOKK****!**

The daemon's Warp Jaws snapped shut. It's multitudinous eyes rolled back in their bony sockets, pale white film glossing over each cornea to protect it. Its skin quivered vilely, the bright colours warping and scintillating with the joy of the kill; and its three long tusks lunged forward to disembowel whatever might be left.

It bit nothing but the air.

Twenty-three sets of malevolent eyes snapped wide open and blinked in a rare confusion.

The meaty girl thing lay right there before its snapping jaws, unharmed and somehow just out of reach. By some unknown means the human had performed otherworldly sorcery upon it, for there was no other explanation why the Screamer could not tear into her flimsy trembling flesh.

Katrys opened her eyes too, Luthox outstretched in her hands in front of her to ward off the imminent attack as though she were bench pressing some invisible weight. She gasped and sat upright. Why was she not dead already? The amulet Big Silver had given her only cloaked her scent from the daemons, it served no other purpose than that. What had happened?

Then she saw it. As astounding and impossible to her as it was to her enemy.

Big Silver had toppled over and was somehow clinging precariously to the end of the creature's tail. But as Katrys looked closer she could see in more detail what unnatural luck had sprung upon her.

"_By the Emperor's Will_," Katrys whispered in reverence.

The Screamer's severed tail, still attached to its writhing body by a few wispy threads and bleeding ichor in grim arcs across the rockcrete, had swung outward of its own dead volition. The long blades protruding from its edges had managed to hook themselves deeply into the great rents torn through the Space Marine's power armour. The daemon had rushed in for the kill once the girl's second shot had failed, but in its sudden rush its tail had snagged her lifeless saviour on the way, managing only to pitch the none too light Adeptus Astartes onto his side like some warped giant man-shaped anchor.

Even in death Big Silver had saved her life, _again_!

Katrys scuttled backward laughing aloud at the creature's misfortune.

The sound of her merriment did not last long because the daemon let loose another fell shriek of head numbing destruction. The roar was swiftly followed by a flash of plasma that missed its target completely, but nevertheless sent her careening in the opposite direction. The Screamer heaved and writhed in outrage, dragging Big Silver clunking behind it.

Ever so slowly the last few tendons still attached to its tail began to slither and pop. The pain only served to raise the beast's fury to boiling point. But Katrys was running fast.

The girl crashed through the upper floor fire escape and leaped the stairs to the lower landing. Her legs were strong, her ankles young and lithe, and she landed with cat-like grace, only overbalancing in order to crash through the next door she came to. Bolt holes and rat runs, she thought. That's all this game was now. She just needed a new weapon, and she needed one fast.

She crashed out into the lower level car park and charged toward the B5 elevator shaft. It would take her straight down to the basement culvert, back to the dark familiarities she had trained so long to navigate. Leaping out into the black space she caught hold of the steel hoist cables, forgetting that her hands were still bleeding from the last climb.

Her panic had jarred her perfect memory. And it almost cost her life.

Like a slick of oil in her palms the steel cables shrieked across her flesh and sent her plummeting into the dark. Katrys was silent as she fell. Nobody would hear her fall, nobody would hear her bones snap wet and awful at the bottom, no one would come to clear away her corpse after she had died. The sound of her terror was the same sound she made each day moving throughout the world. It was silent, all bar the speed of her breathing.

She wrapped her strong legs about the cables and gripped with all her might, and clasping perilously with the crook of her arms. Cloth burned away until friction super-heated steel met flesh beneath. But Katrys gripped even harder. To release over such pain would only see her instant demise.

She was deposited five floors below into a gasping heap. Everything hurt and everything burned.

Her hands, the inside of her thighs, the inside of her arms, even up one side of her neck and cheek. The entire upper layers of dermis burned away in long oily wounds that squealed to be allayed. Something cool, a lotion of some sort, ice, _water_ – _anything_! But all those necessities were far, far away – too far, even further than the nearest armaments.

Above her the roar of the Screamer sounded again and she felt the twang of the steel hoist cables as it smashed up against them. It was coming down after her, and it was coming fast.

Katrys got to her feet and charged out into the rubble of the culvert. She sprinted through agony and silent tears, barely weaving through the jagged spears of dangling reinforcement wire and the sharp edges of broken foundations. Her body wanted only to curl up and hide, but there was nowhere to hide just now. All she could do was run and pray and hoped she reached the weapons cache before the Screamer reached her.

It came bellowing out of the B5 elevator shaft like a bloodhound after a bleeding rabbit. It screamed into the pitch-blackness, its Warp ridden eyes easily seeing through the murk in whatever demonic spectrums had been born into its oculi. It saw the girl, running impossibly fast through the black darkness, her heart bursting and falling, bursting and falling, and it launched itself after her. Its tail was gone but that did not stop it from flying.

Katrys skidded to a halt at a large cave-in where she recalled she had once been stuck for almost three hours with Sagan before she had found the way out. Sagan had a hard time following after the puny thirteen year old girl, down through the small hole that was all that remained of a way into the sewers beneath the basement. She remembered giggling at him when he had got stuck and telling him how he needed to go on a diet. All he had done was shaken his head and grinned.

Now, as she pushed her burning body into the narrow confines she could finally commiserate with the long dead Cadian Guardsman and how much trouble he'd had to follow after her. She squeezed and grunted through the gap, hearing the slavering daemon coming closer and closer through the pitch-black dark.

Could the Screamer contort its daemonic frame and slip in after her with swift murderous ease? She could only pray not. After all, the Emperor and His fortune had kept her safe this far. Why would He leave her now after keeping her safe for so long?

"Fortune plays tricks on the unwary soldier, little fox." Sagan had told her once. "Enjoy it while its there but never rely on it. The Emperor has many souls to look out for. Be thankful if He finds the time to look out for yours at all!"

The hole got tighter and tighter but she heaved the last few inches, feeling dust and rockcrete scrape away at her already shredded face. So much for looking pretty for all the boys, she thought laconically to herself. And she was through!

She dropped down into the cold liquid slop at the bottom. It seeped straight through into her jeans and fur rimmed boots. She winced a little as it licked cool fingers against the long grazes up her calves, but did not wonder too long at what such filth would do festering inside her wounds. She would have to cleanse them as thoroughly as she could. But you can only tend wounds if you're still alive, she told herself.

Dust and stones rained down on her and an unholy snarl ripped the air. Katrys burst into a run, wading and jumping along the semi-submerged tunnel, keeping her head just low enough so that it did not crack into the rounded ceiling above her.

If the Screamer was going to get her, this was the moment it would happen.

But there was a flash of bright light behind her and the hiss of burning tumbling rock. The Screamer roared again, but it was still outside, in the culvert.

Katrys grinned and ran. Her blood pounded mightily in her temples but she pushed herself to whatever brink she was capable of. Move girl, she urged herself, enjoy whatever time you've got because that thing won't take long to break through that rock.

The tunnel twisted and bent. Here and there small collapses barred the way but she merely had to climb over the fallen debris, or worse, crouch lower in the cold muck and wade beneath it. The tunnel branched three times and she prayed this would only assist in throwing off the daemon's pursuit. Finally, she reached a small cistern and climbed the far ladder on the opposite side.

The manhole above her took three big hits from her shoulder, bruising it to the point of numbness, before it finally cracked open and soft light fell in on her.

Cammarack's Sporting Goods & Guard Surplus store was one of the least affected shops in all of Chilegas Falls. Sunlight slanted softly in through the grimy windows. It stood almost as perfectly decorated as it had been before the daemons had attacked. Save for the gathering dust on the old ex-Guard uniforms and PDF combat suits and trench coats. Everything was here an avid hunter or murderer required. There were rifles along one wall, shotguns and stubbers, there were compound bows and knives of all descriptions, but none of these were what she was after. None of them would be a match against a rushing Screamer of Tzeentch! But Sagan, Emperor guide his soul back to mother Cadia, had taught her many tricks.

She closed the manhole beneath her and squelched her way across the store to the cabinets behind the counter. Sagan had taught her that any respectable gunshop owner usually held a stash of more formidable armaments in places the local authorities would not bother to look, or at least averted a solicitous eye in the other direction with a few hundred credits offered within any small purchase over the counter. She found what she was looking for soon enough.

A large packet of bolter rounds. No bolter, unfortunately, to fire them with, but they would make do. She could hear the Screamer's howls vibrating through the floor beneath her feet.

First thing first. Rip-tape and steel-glue were snatched from the drawers; two javelins came off the wall, then a very slick compound bow wrapped in smooth black leather with a sweet and easy draw on it, along with twenty adamantine tipped arrows. On their own these items would do next to nothing to the Screamer, other than perhaps knock it on its back in a fit of daemonic hysterics at her foolishness.

Once a high-explosive bolt was applied carefully to the end of each javelin and arrow tip, wrapped tight in rip-tape and sealed shut with steel-glue, only then did Katrys have something that might actually deserve respect from a daemon. She hunched low. Ruined, ragged and at her wit's end, but she was armed!

The floor trembled beneath her once more and the girl stole herself carefully to the back of the store. She left her soaked boots behind so she might tread more softly, and she wondered if in fact the daemon had lost her trail. The idea only served to add to her aches with such exquisitely painful hope.

She had just settled in behind some heavy bookshelves on Imperial warfare, survival and Ophreagus nautica, when it happened.

It was one of the few times she screeched out in fright.

Against her hip and vibrating like something wild and destructive, Big Silver's amulet, which had protected her from the daemons for all these years, suddenly began to trill – sharp and piercing like a clarion bell. She pulled it out and tossed it across the room, squinting against the keening sound it made in her ears.

"Shut up!" she yelled at the object in disbelief. How could it do this? Now, of all times! "Emperor's blood, be _silent_!"

But the amulet trilled and trilled, urgent and insistent, so loud now that the windows were vibrating and small drifts of dust trickled to the shop floor.

Then the manhole in the middle of the floor exploded open in a bright white flash. The Screamer came pouring out of it like shimmering blue death, and its eyes found her in a flash…


	8. Chapter 8 FINALE

**This is it guys, the final chapter... **

* * *

**{ ..VIII.. }**

Like an ululating harpy the amulet shrilled urgently throughout the store, its keening siren vibrating through the very walls. The daemon screamed in a bid to drown it out.

Katrys remembered once as a little girl she had been cornered in a stranger's yard by a big, scary, mean old dog. She and her best friend Tala were running late for school and had jumped a neighbour's fence to cut through to the main road. Unfortunately Katrys had jumped the fence first. The dog had growled at her, baring its fangs and backing her up against the fence, and the hackles all along its neck had stood up like it was electrified, and little Katrys was terrified beyond belief. But her father had taught her one thing about mean old dogs. Always look them in the eye, and never look away, not once, because in their world the first one to look away was the one who got bit.

It had worked too, for in those few moments within that baleful exchange, they had shared something between them: stories of pain, of living, of loneliness; and the big old dog had skulked away after a minute of slavering growls. But Katrys and her friend had got to school rather late; pale, terrified and amazed she was still alive.

This, however, to say the least, was something profoundly different.

When she stared down the daemon, its eyes flared; and in those haunted tiered pupils she could see a dazzling, maniacal sub-intelligence. And though she fiercely held its gaze, it held hers too, locking them both into a frozen moment in time.

It slowly unfolded itself, realizing it had her cornered, its daemonic frame unlimbering before her eyes; expansive and terrible where it hovered on sorcerous currents above the open manhole. Although its tail might have been missing it still brandished vicious blades along its flanks and awful tusks from around its jaws. Then the Warp Jaws themselves – the worst of all. But those eyes, Katrys wondered, had seen things within the demented tracts of the Immaterium, things that had bent its consciousness in all terrible directions. Perhaps it had once been pure and innocent, like herself before the Great Change? And for a fleeting moment, less than a curl of a breath behind the lips, or the beginning of a blink in time, Katrys thought she could see something in this animal she related to. And it too saw something in her it recognized. Perhaps fear, savage courage born on instinct, lost family and lost hope. But only briefly. In that polarizing fractal moment in time Katrys and Screamer were no longer enemies.

Then Sagan's voice broke through her thoughts, "Know your foe, little fox. Know that there is only one thing in this universe that can stop your enemy from his pursuit to kill. You yourself and little else. For the moment that you hesitate, will be the moment your enemy takes your life."

She blinked. The hesitation had been enough. And just as her lids flashed open, so too did the daemon's jaws. It launched itself at her, having come to the same bloody conclusion.

Katrys let fly.

The bowstring thrummed across her lips and the arrow shot a silver streak through the air.

The arrow skipped just over the bony ridges of the rushing daemon's head and hit the back wall of the store. Arrowhead bit home against primer and the bolter round exploded, blowing a foot-wide hole through the cemented wall. The Screamer flinched low from the sudden explosion, perhaps remembering the obliteration of its sister beneath the unmerciful roar of the twin-linked bolters, and it crashed off course into a long rack of dark grey PDF jumpsuits.

Katrys cursed herself and notched another arrow as quick as she could, knowing this was the last chance she would get.

The daemon howled and flew up at her from the shop floor. She let fly once more.

The Screamer was less than three meters away when the arrowhead exploded against its multitudinous eyes and Katrys dived across the store. The bolter round had gone off and tore apart its face and one side of the daemon's jaw, just as it let out a bellowing peal of plasma. But the girl was already rolling safely to one side.

Super-heated energy vaporized half a bookshelf and the daemon crashed with a thunderous bone jarring impact into the other half.

The Screamer shivered and thrashed around, but where it could have once severed its human prey in half with a single swipe of its deadly tail, only an ichor-spluttering stump heaved and whipped uselessly about. That was its last mistake.

Katrys' eyes lit up with blood rage. It was white and endless and filled with the Emperor's Holy vindication. In her hands she gripped only an ordinary sporting javelin, honed to a fine point at the end of its 2.2-meter shaft. But it was an ordinary sporting javelin with a not so ordinary military grade bolter round taped and glued to its end. It was now, in this exquisite moment, a Spear of the Emperor!

She struck down with all her might as the creature turned on her.

The javelin tip entered the side of the Screamer's cranial bed and detonated the bolter round. Shrapnel and daemon bone lashed across her arms as the small and deadly explosion sundered the creature's brain and snuffed its existence in an instant.

_Back on Holy Terra, within the Sanctum Imperialis, a fine miniscule muscle along the outside edge of the Emperor's little finger twitched with unadulterated pride. The drool that poured from his lifeless lips hesitated, barely perceptible except perhaps to those venerating tech-priests who knelt beside His living-corpse upon the great Golden Throne. Or perhaps none of this happened at all, and it was only a faded warping in the streams of Time._

They fell together in a heap upon the floor. Sprawled across a collection of Ophreagus Hiking Maps. The daemon's black blood pooled across the wide parchments of marked territories in an ever-widening circle like the encroaching victories of a villainous army.

Katrys lay upon the dead beast heaving and retching at the vile touch of its flesh.

She pulled herself off and scuttled further and further back across the shop until she found herself crushed up against the wall beneath an overhanging set of metal boot lockers, gasping in great lungfulls of air. What a birthday!

She was alive. _Emperor's Eyes_, she was actually alive!

Across from her the amulet wailed high and low, high and low, as if it had opted to alert every roaming daemon horde and Chaos patrol within a five-kilometre radius. But she could not leave it behind. It was the only thing that hid her from her enemies. But now it would simply shatter the quiet world around her until the creatures came blundering upon her to find out what all the commotion was about.

Collecting the bow and arrows, and the last bolter-tipped javelin, the girl struggled to her feet, gasping in quick painful breaths with every step. She was covered in ichor and she could feel her wounds biting savagely into her body. She would have to keep moving. That was the answer, the _only_ answer. Keep moving and pray they would not find her.

She winced as she hopped over to the keening amulet, picked it up and stuffed it into the pockets of her big black parka. She found Luthox on the floor where she had left him and swung the las rifle over her shoulder, though there was little good he could do for her now. She would need to toss the battery-clip into a good strong fire for at least three days to recharge it, which would not be happening any time soon.

Out in the street, the bent possessed sun had begun to lower in parody of what it had once naturally done many years ago, offering her a rare sense of normality after such vicissitudes. Sometimes she had seen it rise when it should be lowering, or vice versa, or just spin in strange circles along the horizon. But right now, the sun and the sky, looked almost like an ordinary Summer's afternoon in Chilegas Falls.

There was not a daemon to be seen. Well, not yet anyway. So Katrys began to walk out along the street, hobbling with the aid of the javelin across the rubble and shattered glass of collapsed buildings.

It was the best birthday she could remember.

She hadn't known she was dying until she found herself flat on her back, gazing up at the shimmering sky, feeling like she had just made the best decision of her entire life.

She had blacked out. When she opened her red-rimmed eyes again, the blue-grey stroma of her iris were like storm clouds against the white, blossoming open to absorb the light of the blue sky above. She noticed something arcing across the deep cerulean expanse that filled her vision.

An object, small and circular, hovering closer and closer, and closer.

It was probably another daemon, she thought with a low chuckle that hurt her chest. Come to finish off what its three little sisters had not been capable of finishing. She hoped she pissed them all off! She really did. She was proud of herself. She was a girl no longer. Now she was a woman, and no one, no soldier or daemon, could take that away from her.

The object hovered closer, thrumming in time with the keening wail of the amulet in her pocket. It came to a stop just above where she lay sprawled across the rubble.

Suddenly the amulet went quiet, and the silence that followed was wondrous.

It only lasted a moment before she heard the low thrum of whatever power was keeping the object above her afloat. She blinked up at it and was quite surprised to see a silver skull leering down at her from between two linked las guns. She frowned awkwardly up at the device trying to recall when she had seen something like it before.

It was a servo-skull. She had seen one or two in the early days of the attack. But this one was much larger, more menacing. Who it belonged to or where it had come from she did not have the capacity to fathom. Her blood was pouring out beneath her like a lake. Nor did the skull give her much time. Because suddenly those two las guns were aimed at her and the thing began to speak to her in a deep, machine fabricated voice in a language thoroughly alien to her. She tried to listen harder and realised that it was due to the ichor clogged in her ears that she could not understand her interrogator. One trembling finger pushed into her ear and she cleared the canal. She almost lost consciousness performing that one small action.

"You are not Brother Barramus?" the servo-skull buzzed.

"I'm not what?" Katrys asked feebly. "What are you talking about, flying skull?"

There was a sharp peel of vox-static, a warbling haze of voices, and the servo-skull's silver eyes flashed brightly, once, twice; clicking at the end of each flash.

"Where is Brother Barramus?"

Katrys laughed and shrugged. She was going to be asleep soon. Very soon. "I don't know where your brother is, flying skull. So, why don't you bugger off and leave me alone, _hmmm_?" she felt drunk. It was rather splendid.

The servo-skull dipped down close to her face and something projected from between its teeth. It hovered closer. She could hear the _thrum-thom-thrum-thom_ of its little levitation engine right in her ear and suddenly it was sticking something very sharp and painful into her neck.

A bolt of white-hot adrenalin seared through her body, along with coagulants and other sims. Katrys literally sat bolt upright, her hands clasping at her throat as she screamed out in harrowing agony. But slowly, ever so sweetly, the pain dissipated and she was as awake as though she had just shovelled eighteen cups of Hypa-Caff into her body and swallowed the beans to boot.

"What in the Warp did you just _do_ to me?" she shrieked.

The servo-skull took to the air again and trained its las guns on her. Another burst of vox-static and voices erupted from the leering silvery face above her.

"You are hereby ordered by the authority of Lord Captain Angelus Halikwyn of the Silver Fists Chapter to divulge immediately, and confess to the whereabouts of the missing battle-brother, Barramus Rynchryst. What regiment do you belong? Who is your commanding officer?"

Katrys glared up at the thing wondering if she should shoot it out of the sky before it sent a barrage of las-bolts through her. She doubted it, under the circumstances. She did not even care to respond to it though she assumed it had not given her much choice.

"There is no one left here to command, other than me." She stopped. Her heart flopped, then rushed again. "Did you say… _Battle brother?_"

"Yes. Please confess the whereabouts of Brother Barramus. You are illegally in possession of his appointed Rosarius. Do you know where he might be?"

She stared in wonder up at the skull. "Are you _Adeptus Astartes_?"

"I am a mere servitor to the Adeptus Astartes Silver Fists Chapter. Deliver your answer immediately."

Katrys burst into tears then. Great huge sobbing wails she could not control. Snot erupted from her nose and her tears burnt away all vision. She tried to talk but all that came out were wailing howls so loud they hurt. All the horror unleashed from a girl who could not remember knowing hope.

The servo-skull continued, though another voice this time appeared to have taken over it. "You have survived adverse conditions for an extensive period of time in such inhospitable terrain, miss. You are suffering from mass trauma, psychically, physically and mentally. But you must answer our question. Where is Brother Barramus."

Katrys pointed to the shattered outline of Sunkiss Fair. "Up there," she said in a small voice, thick with emotion. "Atop the roof."

The servo-skull hummed away above the rubble strewn street, and Katrys thought it had left her for good. Her last hope gone, her only chance to find safety in all the universe, drifting away without a care; looking for a dead marine it would never be able to revive.

A lot happened after that, but it all spun in loud erratic flashes of comprehension:

_The Thunderhawk gunship touching down beside her. _

_Big Silver's huge, limp frame returned to his brothers by a small flock of hovering servo-skulls, each one the bright gleaming silver of the Space Marine Chapter it served._

_A helmetless Space Marine checks over Big Silver's body. They look identical to one another, battle brothers side by side once again. "His gene-seed is still in place," he says to his brothers. "The incursion was not in vain, thank the Emperor. Take him aboard."_

_Silver Fists plunging from the rear gangway of the Thunderhawk, bolters in arms searching the skies for the Foe._

_The helmetless marine now bending over Katrys, his face luminous and pale, his strange eyes gazing deeply into hers as he touches her temples with his fingers. Turning, he calls to his fellow Adeptus Astartes waiting by the armoured gunship. "The taint is there, though it is only mild. I think she will be safe enough to transport."_

_One of the big silver men glares at him through sharp black eye-lenses, shrugging his huge armoured shoulders. "You had better be certain, Chaplain Caurvek. I don't need the Inquisition bothering us because your hunch was poorly considered."_

_The mighty Space Marine Chaplain shakes his bald scarred head. "No, I am certain. There is great hope in this one, and a wealth of intelligence to be accessed. She will serve us well."_

_Big Silver, no, not Big Silver, but one of his many mighty brothers, picks her up in his arms as though she weighs less than a kitten. He carries her into the red-lit corridor inside the gunship._

_The floor vibrates and she can feel the Thunderhawk howling all around her, lifting up from her home world into the skies. She will never see Ophreagus again._

_Dark cobalt masks on silver shoulders look down on her and the Chaplain, Caurvek, is there, his gigantic hands clasping hers, warm and reassuring. He seems almost kind for something so huge and grizzled. "You're safe now, little one." He whispers to her in a gentle, deep voice. And she wishes Sagan were still alive so she could prove him wrong about Space Marines. "You're going to be alright. You are amongst friends…"_

She sleeps.

Yes.

This was the best birthday present she could have ever hoped for.

* * *

**To all of you who read this through to the end, a great big salute! I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for your support, from all over the world. I would love to hear all your thoughts on it, what you think could have been done better, what you enjoyed and so forth. Any fluffimaticians please feel free to break it open and analyze.**

**I was so close to making it end badly for Katrys, darkly poetic and all, but I found a place for her in the darker grim futures of my mind; and I just had to save her butt so she could fight again another day, or should I say torture her, the thoughts are stirring already. **

**But right now a break is due, and its time for me to get reading some of these other pieces in here. Some of you have had my reviews, for others I'm on the way.**

**Feedback is real sustenance for a struggling writer, and it has been wonderful to dine with such pleasant company. **

**A salute,**

**Rawk!**


End file.
